Saturday, February 11, 2012

Why I’m not a sprinter

I’m always looking for a good excuse as to why I’m no good at sprinting. Thanks to the work of Stephen Piazza and his colleagues from Pennsylvania State University, I may have found just the thing. Apparently, I don’t have the right foot and ankle structure.

The researchers compared the foot length and ankle positions of eight sprinters with eight height-matched not-sprinters. You won’t be surprised to learn that the sprinters feet had different proportions than the non-sprinters. Archimedes invented a little tool called ‘the lever’ that explains this quite nicely. The amount of force needed to use a lever depends on its length and on the position of the fulcrum along that lever. A longer foot coupled with a shorter Achilles tendon gives sprinters a mechanical advantage each time they push against the ground.

To be honest, I haven’t measured the ratios of my toe bones to my tendons. I’m quite willing to assume that I would have been a world-class sprinter if it weren’t for my unfortunate draw in the foot genetics pool. Otherwise, I’d have to fall back on lack of practice, and no one wants that.

Stochastic Scientist? What's up with that?

Why the Stochastic Scientist? As I'm sure you all know, 'stochastic' is another word for 'random', which is what I intend for the focus of this blog. Although my formal training is as a molecular biologist, there are many other fields of science that are also fascinating and beautiful. It's my intention to blog about which ever scientific discovery or invention catches my, and hopefully your, fancy.

I also hope to inspire people to learn more about science. By choosing among a huge variety of scientific endeavors, I'll undoubtably hit upon something that will pique my readers' interest.

I guess I could have called my blog 'The Joy of Science', but that wouldn't have been quite so random.